June 14, 1998, Sunday
Eighteen years ago, Wojciech Kozak helped build
Trump Tower, the skyscraper jewel in Donald J. Trump's real-estate empire. Today, Mr.
Kozak recalls that time with nightmare memories of backbreaking 12-hour shifts and of
being cheated with 200 other undocumented Polish immigrants out of meager wages and fringe
benefits.
"We worked in horrid, terrible conditions," Mr. Kozak
said of the six months he spent in 1980 wielding a sledgehammer and a blowtorch in
demolishing the Bonwit Teller Building on Fifth Avenue to make way for Trump Tower.
"We were frightened illegal immigrants and did not know enough about our
rights."
Mr. Kozak, like other laborers on that job, has no hope of
collecting about $4,000 in back wages from a contracting company that began the demolition
and later became insolvent. But after almost two decades, the demolition workers are still
struggling to compel Mr. Trump and his business associates to compensate a union's welfare
funds and thus increase pension and medical benefits for some of the Polish workers.
Mr. Kozak is now a party and witness in a class-action lawsuit
that has meandered through the Federal courts for 15 years and charges
that Mr. Trump owes $4 million to the union welfare funds for the work the Poles
performed. Filed in 1983, the suit has been bogged down by a torrent of motions and appeals of judicial decisions and by the deaths of a judge, a lawyer, the
original lead plaintiffs, an important witness and two of Mr. Trump's co-defendants.
In an effort to resolve the tangled case -- one of the oldest on
the civil dockets of the Federal District Court in Manhattan -- Judge Kevin T. Duffy last
month warned lawyers for both sides to be prepared to begin a jury trial on 48 hours'
notice.
But on Thursday, in a development that could delay the trial yet
again, Judge Duffy ordered the case assigned to another judge. Lawyers for both sides said
the 48-hour notice was still in effect, but that it was unclear when the
trial would start.
Mr. Trump denies that he was aware of the working conditions at
the site in 1980 or that any of the demolition workers were undocumented immigrants. He is
also chal lenging claims that he is liable for payments to the union that were evaded by
the demolition contractor.
"All we did was to try to keep a job going that was started
by someone else," Mr. Trump, in an interview, said of his company's efforts to
guarantee that the demolition contractor paid wages to employees. "In fact, we helped people and it has cost a lot of money in legal fees."
Mr. Kozak and other Polish immigrants who were hired for the
demolition said in interviews that they often worked in choking clouds of asbestos dust
without protective equipment. They accepted the conditions because they thought the job
would pay 10 times as much as they could earn in Poland, said Mr. Kozak,
56, a slightly built man who became an American citizen and joined a laborers' union.
Julian Nalepa, 63, who suffered a head injury in the demolition,
said he and fellow workers were baffled by the unending suit. "It
makes you think that only the rich have rights in the courts," he said.
The demolition project on Fifth Avenue and 56th Street lasted from
January to June 1980. It cleared the way for an ornate 68-story glass-sheathed structure
containing shops and an atrium on the lower floors and 263 condominium apartments above that originally sold for $500,000 to $10 million each.
The tower was financed and built by Mr. Trump's development
company, the Trump Organization, and the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United
States.
According to court records and testimony, the Trump-Equitable
joint venture hired Kaszycki and Sons Contractors Inc. at a fee of $775,000 to raze Bonwit
Teller's 10-story flagship department store although the contractor had little demolition
experience. Demolition Workers Local 95 of the Laborers' International
Union of North America had a collective bargaining agreement with the Kaszycki company, of
Herkimer, N.Y., requiring it to pay specified wages to union and nonunion workers at the
Trump Tower site and to make additional payments for each worker into the local's pension
and medical insurance funds.
Wendy E. Sloan and Lewis M. Steel, lawyers for
current and retired Local 95 members in the suit, assert that William Kaszycki, owner of
the contracting company, hired about 200 Polish immigrants who were not Local 95 members
and agreed to pay them $4 to $5 an hour on 12-hour shifts seven days a week.
The Kaszycki company, the plaintiffs said, violated the union's
$11-an-hour minimum wage scale and made payments to the local's welfare funds for only 12
to 15 employees. The contractor also failed to pay the 200 Poles their full wages, causing
work stoppages and delays.
The plaintiffs contend that Mr. Trump was
desperate to meet demolition and construction deadlines and that his company in May 1980
began supervising the demolition, assuming full responsibility for adhering to the union
contract and for the payments to the union welfare funds.
When the suit was filed in 1983, the lead plaintiff was Harry J.
Diduck, a dissident member of Local 95. Mr. Diduck had not worked at Trump Tower but
maintained that that he and about 500 Local 95 members and retirees lost medical and
pension benefits because Trump-Equitable and the Kaszycki company owed the union funds
more than $300,000.
After eight years of arguments and a nonjury
trial on some of the issues, in 1991 Judge Charles E. Stewart of Federal District Court in
Manhattan ruled that Mr. Trump and his associates conspired with Local 95's president,
John Senyshyn, to withhold payments to the funds. He determined that Trump-Equitable owed $325,415 plus interest.
Both sides, however, appealed the findings and each won partial
victories. A Federal appeals court upheld most of Judge Stewart's decisions but ruled that
Trump-Equitable had been denied a full opportunity to rebut the charge that the funds had
been damaged by the loss of contributions for the Polish workers.
The appeals court also ruled that Judge Stewart
wrongly dismissed a claim by the plaintiffs that the Trump group was responsible for
payments to the funds because it had been the workers' actual employer.
Judge Stewart died in October 1994 and the case, with new issues at stake, was assigned to Judge Duffy. But progress was further hampered by the deaths since 1991 of Mr.
Diduck, the original plaintiff; Burton H. Hall, a lawyer for the
plaintiffs, and Mr. Kaszycki and Mr. Senyshyn, who were co-defendants.
Before ordering lawyers to be ready for trial on
two days' notice, Judge Duffy recently denied motions for further
delays.
Admonishing both sides, he said, "There must be an end to all
litigation: even Jarndyce v. Jarndyce ground down to a conclusion." He was referring
to an estate dispute in Charles Dickens's novel "Bleak House" involving
generations of the Jarndyce family that was so convoluted no one understood it.
Edwin G. Schallert, the chairman of the Federal Court Committee of
the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, described the Trump
case's longevity as "extraordinarily rare" for the District
Court. Mr. Schallert said records show that the average civil suit in the court takes 29
months and that 90 percent of cases are tried within four years.
At different stages, Mr. Trump has retained four prominent
Manhattan law firms to represent him. "The legal history of this case is a jigsaw
puzzle," said Thomas A. Bolan, Mr. Trump's latest lawyer and a former partner of the
late Roy M. Cohn. "We are now back to square one on the key issues."
Mr. Trump, who is expected to testify at the trial, said he had resisted efforts to settle the case out of court.
"It would be cheaper, but on principle I won't," he said. "We did nothing
wrong."
Ms. Sloan, the plaintiffs' lead lawyer, said she would be paid for
15 years of legal work only if her side won. The fees would be set by by the court, she
added, and would be paid by Mr. Trump and his co-defendants. She estimated that if the
$300,000 judgment, and accumulated interest, is upheld a second time, the payments would
reach about $4 million.
"When you are facing large firms, it tends to make the litigation protracted," said Ms. Sloan, who is a solo practitioner specializing in union and civil rights law. "But we are stubborn."